Alexander Garden, an opponent of religious enthusiasm, is known for his arguments with the charismatic instigator of the Great Awakening, George Whitefield. In his office as commissary of the Church of England, Garden represented the ecclesiastical authority of the bishop of London in the Carolinas and Georgia. His censure of Whitefield grew out of the Church's displeasure with its Methodist offspring and with the theologies and practices of the Great Awakening.

Born in Scotland about 1685, Alexander Garden was granted a master's degree and ordained in his land of birth. He came to Charleston in 1719, the same year South Carolina became a royal province. Soon after his arrival, he was elected to the rectorship of St. Philip's parish. The Anglican church in South Carolina had grown during the first two decades of the eighteenth century. Despite yellow fever and hurricanes, a war with the Yemassee Indians, and religious rebellion...